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Explore IT@IU

Completed project: Second Life Faculty Learning Community: Exploring
teaching and learning with Second Life

Primary UITS contact: John Gosney

Completed: August 13, 2013

Description: As students and instructors become
increasingly comfortable (and confident) in the online environment,
there is a growing interest in exploring new technologies and tools
that appear to have the potential of making teaching and learning in
the online space more engaging, while at the same time ensuring it
remains pedagogically sound. The online virtual world Second Life continues to be
considered one such tool in furthering the definition and scope of an
online learning environment.

Outcome: The Exploring Teaching and Learning with
Second Life FLC includes a specific focus on how online environments,
specifically Second Life, can enhance teaching and learning across a
wide variety of disciplines/areas of interest. This FLC is intended
to encourage faculty to explore whether Second Life enhances or
enables our ability to:

Develop new pedagogies that take advantage of the wide array of
options available in the virtual environment (e.g., the ability to
"fly", and/or to design replicas of real-world environments otherwise
inaccessible in a traditional course format)

Utilize Second Life in conjunction with other Web 2.0
technologies

Explore opportunities to collaborate with other institutions
using Second Life for teaching and learning

A Second
Life Avatar Basic Training Checklist is now available. Many thanks
to Gregory Ogle (IUK) for developing and sharing this
guide. Additional "building" continues to be performed on the IU
Second Life teaching island (IUSL). The island can be reached
"in-world" by searching on "IUSL".

August 19, 2011 at 10am: General information session to be held
via Adobe Connect (Note: This will repeat information
given during the August 16 presentation, and will use same URL as
listed above.)

August 26, 2011 at 9:30am: Live "in-world" demonstration of the IU
Second Life island (Note: You will need to create a
free Second Life avatar to attend this session; information on doing
so will be given at the 8/16 and 8/19 sessions). The in-world location
for this demonstration will be at
http://world.secondlife.com/place/ad50ecb7-4f76-091c-3187-7706eb19e0fc.

Benefits: Given that the physical and geographical
confines of the "real world" don't apply in a virtual world like
Second Life, the opportunities for innovative teaching and learning
are extensive. Possible scenarios for exploration might include the
following:

An English professor teaching Hamlet wants her students to better
understand the time period in which Shakespeare was writing. By
touring a virtual Globe Theater and dressing their Second Life avatars
(digital representations of themselves) in Elizabethan-era clothing,
students are able to contextualize their study of the play in a more
experiential fashion.

As part of a series of lectures on serious mental disorders, a
psychology professor wants his students to "experience" schizophrenia.
As such, students are asked to visit a simulation area within Second
Life where their avatars experience auditory and visual hallucinations
in a manner not easily (or even feasibly) produced in a real world
environment. Given that Second Life allows for an avatar's "in-world"
actions to be recorded, students are asked to capture their
experiences and then reflect on them later as part of a group
assignment.

In conjunction with real-world training, a professor of radiology
designs a virtual lab where student avatars can role play as both
technicians and patients. Moreover, by taking advantage of Second
Life's ability to provide live audio chat, the technician/patient
interaction takes on an enhanced level of realism, and allows for
observation by other students.

An archaeology professor wants her first-year students to
experience the excavation of a dinosaur fossil on a Montana dig site.
Rather than only show slides of her own experiences at such a site,
the professor has her students visit a virtual dig site in Second
Life, where their avatars can gain a better sense of excavation
techniques and more closely observe the placement of a dig in the
context of its larger environment.

An engineering professor would like his students to have a better
conceptual understanding of skyscraper design and construction,
specifically the load and vibration factors that impact such
structures. He meets his students in-world at the ground floor of a
virtual skyscraper, where he offers some preliminary remarks; then, he
and his students "fly" to the top of the skyscraper, so he can
continue his lecture in the context of having students observe the
skyscraper's virtual sway.

A human computer interaction (HCI) instructor seeks to broaden her
students' understanding and advocacy for all users. She creates an
assignment where student teams will consider avatars with disabilities
(vision, hearing, mobility, and cognitive) in the context of Second
Life, and consider the cultural impacts, the adaptive technologies
used, and the benefits/limitations to the accessibility of available
information and interactions in Second Life. In turn, students will
use this information to create universal design specifications for
virtual worlds.

Related information: More information on the
educational benefits of working with Second Life can be found at Second
Life Education.

Client impact: The primary goal of a faculty
learning community (FLC) is to explore a specific topic area or theme
as it relates to best practices in teaching and learning. This goal is
achieved by providing safe, supportive communities wherein members can
engage in research, scholarship of teaching and learning, and service
to explore new approaches to teaching.

Project team:

Learning Technologies

University
Information Technology Services IT Communications Office

University
Information Technology Services Indiana University campus centers for
teaching and learning